We've Created a Nan-ster!

    Have spent a lot of time talking about a lot of the big things recently, and kept intending to change that but big things just kept happening.  This trend hasn’t stopped—still going to new villages, could tell long narratives about all that, but it would start getting repetitive.  If it hasn’t already.  So some random thoughts now, in no particular order.
    There are a number of things that I will never again take for granted.  Trashcans come to mind—my third story window just isn’t the same.  Traffic laws, or at least people’s willingness to follow them.  Black coffee.  That any store person should be able to break a $10 dollar bill.  That one is a serious problem.  The ATM’s here spit out 500Rs notes, which is a bit more than ten bucks.  Nobody will take them.  You basically have to be in a decently nice restaurant to use them.  Even hundreds raise eyes.  That’s the equivalent of someone not being able to break a $2 bill, if we still used those.  I got a 1000Rs once.  It literally took me 4 days to find someone to break it.  But the number one thing on my list of things-not-to-be-taken-for-granted is toilette paper.  They just don’t seem to have it here.  Anywhere.  You’re lucky if you get a toilette that actually lets you sit down. (seriously, if its just a hole in the ground I don’t need a special piece of porcelain to show me where to put my feet, I think I could have figured that bit out myself thanks).  To date, I have used a wide variety of things as TP instead of resorting to the favored Indian method, the mechanics of which I have not yet determines, that involves your left hand and a bucket of water.  My own stash of TP.  Kleenex.  Napkins.  Notebook paper.  Leaves.  The cardboard from a finished roll of toilette paper.  Newspaper.  The little paper strip thingy they wrap around the seat cover at fancy hotels to show that has been disinfected.  I’m probably forgetting some.  I always feel a bit like MacGyver when I feel the urge and realize I’ve forgotten my personal roll.
    I am baffled by the quantity of goats here.  They are everywhere.  This normally would not be so strange—if I saw the same number of say chickens, or even cows, I would not thin twice about it (well OK for the cows I would, but only because I would be watching my step a little more diligently), but there are some circumstances that make this puzzling.  Most people here are vegetarian.  Not everyone, but a large majority.  Furthermore, there are no goat milk products.  None.  I asked about it, and they said that nobody drinks the milk, and looked perplexed when I mentioned cheese.  So what the fuck do they use them for?  I mean the things are everywhere, large herds in the fields, stragglers on the streets, even the occasional herd wandering in the middle of the city.  Maybe they are there in lieu of a garbage service (see list of things I will never take for granted again, above), and if so I want to complain to their manager, because they are doing a terrible job.
    It is very difficult to nonverbally say no here.  Nodding still means yes, but shaking your head is not a recognized signal.  In fact, it is very close to a head-wiggle gesture which translates roughly to ‘I understand you’ or ‘this all makes sense so far,’ or, in most cases, ‘yes.’  (It looks like the Whit nod minus the vertical component, or a extremely calmed down version of the Garber Jig isolated in the head, for those of you who know what those things are…)  So to summarize, nodding means yes, and shaking your head also means yes.  If you want to say no, its best to stick to words.
    Having said that, it is also very difficult to verbally say no here.  Rickshaw drivers and street sellers don’t really seem to get the concept.  But my personal favorite is families trying to give you food.  It is a part of Indian hospitality that guests must be offered food and usually tea or something as well, and as we are visiting many households we get given a lot of food.  The best we can usually do is convince them that we will share, and don’t actually need 4 plates of cookies.  I’ve now had 2 meals in families houses in Alakkudi.  These are large scale events, with us seated on the floor eating off banana leaves and them serving food out of absurdly large containers.  If you finish what is on your leaf, this apparently is a signal that you want more.  If you refuse, say that you are full etc, they will withdraw their heaping spoon.  But only temporarily.  As soon as you look away, they swoop in and drop another heaping pile of rice in front of you. 
    Which reminds me—eating with our hands.  Or more accurately, hand.  Because of the customary use of the left hand (see toilette paper rant) South Indian custom (understandably) says that you should only eat with your right hand.  This does not seem to bad in theory, but think about it a little more.  The food we are talking about here is almost entirely rice based.  Doused in watery sauce.  And you are eating off the floor, so you can’t use the tip-bowl-and-shovel technique I usually employ when eating sauced rice with chopsticks. And there aren’t any edges in which one could corner rebellious morsels.  At both of the lunches with rural families that I have been at, the mothers have eventually taken pity on me and scrounged up a fork somewhere.  I feel slightly offended—did it really look like I was struggling that badly?—but mostly just relieved.
    Communication is also very difficult, we have discovered, at restaurants.  Frequently our visits go something like this: the first waiter comes over, and we start telling him what we want.  He leaves abruptly and begins a game I like to call ‘find the coworker who speaks the best English.’  Because it wasn’t obvious when the large group of white people walked in that Tamil probably wasn’t going to be the lingua franca.  Take to on ordering.  Many of the things on the menu are not actually available.  Nobody seems to have pallak paneer, even though it is on every menu in the state of Tamil Nadu.  We get our food.  Usually at least one of the main dishes is wrong, and we always have to engage in high level diplomatic interactions to end up with the right amount of nan and other breadstuffs.  Recently, at a relatively nice restaurant, we asked for 5 orders of nan.  We ended up with three.  We tried to explain the mistake, and ended up getting 5 more nan, and then 3 more from the guy who had actually understood what was going on.  I may or may not have cracked an incredibly terrible pun which gave this post its name, but that doesn’t really sound like me now does it?
    Another strange aspect of eating out in South India is the phenomenon of the AC room.  All of the high class people, and as foreigners we apparently qualify as such, apparently like eating in dark rooms with either no windows at all or windows shoddily boarded up with plywood, different menus (+10Rs per item) and an AC unit.  Apparently they don’t want us “eating with the plebes,” to quote Katherine. 
    There are frequently TV’s in these AC rooms, and this has led to another strange observation.  We have dubbed it the attractiveness differential.  This term describes the inevitable fact that in every single Indian music video—at least all of those that we have seen so far—the girls are significantly more attractive than their male counterparts.  We’re talking tall, young, thin, busty women opposite 35 year old men with mustaches, beer bellies and frequently oddly bulging eyes.  Inexplicable.
    We had our first run in with a pickpocket on a bus back to our hotel.  Jesse was standing, and it was crowded.  She feels something tugging at her bag, which looks deceptively easy to get into, and sees the hand of the woman next to her on the bag, tugging at the opening.  She stares the woman down, and the hand leaves.  Here’s the punch line—the woman in question was using a baby, which she seemed to be breast feeding at the time, for cover.  Starting him early in the ways of a life of crime.
    Finally my favorite/the most cliché of my little anecdotes.  We went into Alakkudi again the other day to do a focus group with 7 college kids in a variety of programs from the town.  We did the interview in a half constructed building on a palm grove, and got some really good insights.  The most interesting info came from them when they weren’t actually answering questions directly but instead joking with each other about the answers.  We then had lunch at one of their houses, off the floor, and that supplied the material for a number of the little blurbs above.  After lunch we were taken next door to admire their neighbors sound system and TV.  Which meant watching 20 minutes of Tamil music videos.  The only interesting part was a video where both the leads, man and woman, ended up at some point being the chief minister (the equivalent of Governor of a US state) of Tamil Nadu, and it was rumored that they had had an affair.  Good to know that the US hardly has a monopoly on absurd political story lines.
    Finally, went to play cricket in the fields with the boys that we had interviewed along with other guys from the village.  Was amazingly fun.  They went easy on us, pitching pretty slow, but it was still really cool.  Learned the basic rules, but also definitely felt the whole ‘sports bringing people of different cultures together’ thing that I always scoff at as being just too pat.  Also tried to explain water polo to them, which was an entertaining challenge.  Also bonded with one of the kids over whistling—he did the two finger whistle, and I surprised him by responding.  As we left, going to catch our train, he would whistle from the field and I would whistle back until the shrill noise faded into the distance.  Thanks mom for that surprisingly random point of cultural connection.  And as an added bonus, I was significantly louder than him too, so good job with the teaching.
    That isn’t nearly all of the little oddities so far, but all that I’ll rant on right now.  We’re almost done with field work for the time being, and will soon be heading back to Chennai (not exactly sure when—solid travel plans, like almost everything else at the IFMR, are rather elusive), where hopefully I will have reliable internet.  For the time being, I will post this whenever I can steal my way onto someone else’s computer.